Accordion Player in Nashville, TN

Main menu

Monthly Archives: July 2017

For those who don’t know, in most music videos, what you hear is not actually being produced by what you’re seeing. The audio is usually from the actual studio recording, created separately and well in advance. When the video is shot, the musicians are simply playing along (or maybe even miming and not producing any sound at all) as the recording blasts from speakers somewhere as a timing reference. The different takes and camera angles are then edited together, the original recording is dropped in as a soundtrack, and voila! There’s your video.

Well, I was recently called up to play in a music video for the Nashville Celts, a local band that I’ve played accordion with a few times before. In this case, the main song we were to shoot already had accordion on the recording, played by the very talented session ace Jeff Taylor. (A surprising number of Nashville accordionists are named “Jeff” for some reason.) I like to think that I was picked for the video because I’m so photogenic, but I suspect it was really because I will work for much cheaper than any of the other Jeffs.*

Anyway, after we finished all the takes for the first tune, we still had time for another quick video. On this other song there was no accordion at all. But hey, I was there, so why not fill in some space? I brought a concertina with me, which seemed to fit the vibe of the song.

The end result is a video with me playing a concertina you can’t hear**, on a song that doesn’t even have concertina on it, from an album another accordionist played on in the first place.

But it’s a good tune and worth a look if only for that:

* Or is the correct plural “Jeves”?

** Except in the very beginning, where I’m trying to figure out how the thing goes…